Chapter 4
I asked Alma Halsey to go out with me several times that summer, to a lecture, a play and a band concert in the park by the river. On none of these occasions did I speak of West to her, and she did not ask me whether I had any dealings with him.
One July evening, as we walked slowly along French Hill Street toward the house where Alma lived, I asked about her father, Dr. Allan Halsey. I was curious to find out more about West’s nemesis, even though Alma was hardly an unbiased source.
“Papa? Oh, he’s the original solid citizen. Too solid, I think. No new ideas can penetrate that cranium, not if they come from me, anyway. He was dead set against my going to medical school, but thought librarianship was a suitable profession for a young lady. And at least he and Mama have been good about my working at a job. And I managed to move out of their house. The wife of one of Papa’s colleagues needed a companion when her husband died. She keeps afloat by renting out rooms, you see, so the parents agreed that I should live with her and help her out. I think it’s because they’re sure it’s only temporary. Until the right young man comes along, you know.”
“And is it?” I asked.
“Not at all. I intend to go on working, whether I get married or not. And I have no plans for that at present,” she said, laughing.
I did something else during those weeks of waiting. I went once more to look at the Necronomicon, this time for my own reasons.
The more I read about the medical and scientific topics recommended to me by West, the less I understood his reasons for consulting the ancient tome. I could not fathom how a medical researcher in the 20th century could find anything even remotely relevant in the writings of an Arab of Yemen who had lived more than a thousand years before.
There was also the disturbing memory of the hours I had spent poring over the book at West’s side, translating, supposedly, but I knew not what. Again and again I had tried to relive that experience, to wring memories from my brain. Had I been the victim of a hallucination? I am a competent Latinist, but had found the language of the Necronomicon dense and impenetrable. I had translated word by word, not comprehending any unified meaning. So late one day, I went again to the Library’s Administration Office.
It was a hot, still afternoon. The formidable Miss Hardy was on her annual vacation, leaving the office staffed only by her assistant, a browbeaten young woman by name of Miss Reid. She had no objection to my brief explanation that I needed to check a reference in one of the rare books in the vault.
I unlocked the heavy door and entered. It was a little cooler there but the air seemed dead. Because I expected my visit to be a brief one I did not bother to carry the book out to the consultation room. When I lifted it from its drawer, it felt extraordinarily heavy, even more than it had when I handed it to West. And again, I was conscious of an odour – cold earth, as on that other occasion, but also a faint scent of narcissus. When I laid the volume on the table at the back of the vault I felt as though I relinquished a heavy burden.
I certainly did not expect to be able to find the exact passages I had translated for West. I remembered that he had brought some references with him, which he had used to find the paragraphs that interested him. He had never told me how he could have navigated with such precision in a book he had never seen before, an ancient book which lacked such modern features as a table of contents or index, written in a language with which he was only just conversant.
I opened the book at random and read the first text I saw. The black type was so sharp and bright that the letters seemed almost alive. It was as though the Necronomicon spoke to me, confidentially, in a barely audible murmur. As nearly as I can remember, this is what it said (the translation my own, of course):
The wind of the world blows equally through the living and the dead. He that fears not the night nor the Worm that gnaws, he that looks into the microcosm and the macrocosm, he that dares to follow the spiralling of the blood into the abyss, may cleave the lesser from the greater, the immortal from the mortal, and find life in the place of death. But one that ventures therein should have at his side a good companion as his doorkeeper and warden, for it is written that none shall tarry over-long in the nether deeps, lest he cede himself entirely to the Worm.
Surely this was the passage I had vaguely remembered! Profoundly astonished, I read it again. Comprehension brushed at my consciousness, then departed on dark wings. The perfume of narcissus was suddenly intolerable. Blackness enfolded me, and I fainted, sliding to the floor while grasping at the table for support.
I came to myself to find Miss Reid grasping my shoulder and whispering anxiously. “Mr. Milburn, wake up! Mr. Milburn, are you all right? Should I fetch a doctor? Oh dear, oh dear!”
“I’m all right,” I said, although I wasn’t. My head ached and I felt embarrassed and confused. It had been a mistake to stay in the airless vault, especially on such a hot day. “Really, Miss Reid, I’m fine. It’s quite hot and stuffy in here, and I must have… nodded off. I think I had better go home now.”
With her rather ineffectual help, I managed to get to my feet and close the Necronomicon, taking care to avoid looking at the page I had been reading. The strange perfume had vanished as though it had never been. It was only as I was leaving the Library that I remembered I had not made a note of my visit in the vault log, contrary to regulations.
By the following afternoon I was feeling better, although I had a lingering headache. I was leafing through an unbelievably dull treatise on Greek philosophy that I was cataloguing when one of the library pages came puffing up to my desk with a note for me. I thanked the boy and waited until he had gone before I opened it.
It was from West. Come immediately, it said.
Now? I had never been less inclined to engage in something both illegal and dangerous. And what the devil were we going to do at four in the afternoon? Even at my slowest and clumsiest it could not take more than an hour to prepare the laboratory and assemble the equipment. Surely West did not intend to transport a corpse through the streets of Arkham during the afternoon rush hour? But perhaps he had managed somehow to smuggle the thing into his rooms already. In my fragile state I found only scant comfort in this possibility.
And yet I never even considered not going. I grabbed my jacket and ran for the door, only to encounter Peter Runcible.
“And where are you off to, Mr. Milburn?” he asked. The hot weather was not kind to him. He looked damp and wrinkled. I imagined a miasma of sweat hanging about him, and felt sick again.
“I’m… not well, sir,” I answered, wildly. This was true. My headache was worse, and I felt hot and cold by turns. “I must go, now!”
My desperation must have suggested to him that I was about to be sick on the floor. “All right, all right, go home if you must. But I hope to see you here tomorrow morning, alive and well.”
I waved a hand toward him and ran.
It was only three blocks to West’s quarters. Five minutes after I had escaped from Runcible, I pounded up the front steps, crossed the porch and hammered on the door.
After a moment, West opened it. He looked as cool and calm as I was hot and frantic. He motioned me into the hall, closed the door and looked me up and down.
“You get good marks for speed, but a failure for discretion,” he said. “Next time you must try to arrive with less of a flurry. We don’t want to attract attention, you know.”
“What do you mean, ‘good marks,’ ‘next time’?” I asked, breathing hard and getting angry. “Do you mean to say this was some sort of test?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered. “My apologies, Charles, but you must admit that I couldn’t very well give you prior notice. It’s crucial that there be no slip-ups when the time comes.”
“Herbert,” I said, “this is unreasonable. I left work early, saying I was ill. There’ll be the devil to pay for that tomorrow. I’m hot, I’m tired and I’m… disgusted.”
He looked astonished. “Really, Charles,
I shouldn’t think that a three-block walk would be such an inconvenience. And anyway, it isn’t really a test.” He produced once more that charming smile that had disarmed Miss Hardy, and me, too. “We have a body.”
I flopped into a chair. “This is too much,” I said. “Give me a minute. You mean this is really it? We’re going ahead?”
“We’re going ahead. Tonight.”
While we fortified ourselves with a plate of sandwiches and some lemonade, West outlined his strategy.
“First we’ll set up the lab and prepare the solution. Then we’ll have a rest. This is going to be an all-night enterprise, so we need to be reasonably fresh going into it. It doesn’t get really dark until after ten, unfortunately, but that can’t be helped. As soon as it’s dim enough to blur details we’ll dress as workmen and carry our equipment to the site.”
“What equipment, what site?” I asked. “I thought we were doing it here.” My headache had faded, but I still felt foggy.
“The site is the graveyard by Hangman’s Hill, the potter’s field,” said West. “And the equipment is a couple of spades, some rope and a pry-bar. Is that clear?”
“Graveyard, spades?” I knew I sounded like a babbling idiot, but I couldn’t help it. “We’re going to dig up a grave?”
He gave me a look that dropped the temperature in my immediate vicinity by several degrees. “Charles, did you actually think that the body would be delivered to the door by Acme Corpse Specialists? I thought I explained all that. Yesterday I heard that a young fellow named John Hocks had drowned in Summer’s Pond and was to be buried today in the potter’s field. So tonight is our earliest opportunity. I thought I was giving us plenty of time to get ready, but it seems I’m wrong. Now, do you think you can pull yourself together by nightfall? If not, say so now and go home. In your present state you’ll be no help at all, quite the contrary.”
“I’m sorry, Herbert. I’ve felt a little shaky all day. It’s the heat, maybe. But about this body, I thought you said we could get one from the morgue.”
“In theory, yes. It would certainly be quicker and neater, except for two things. One: I don’t have access to the morgue. I’m not yet a doctor, and I’m under a cloud at the Med. School, as you know, so I would have to bribe the attendant just to get in. Getting out with a body would be next to impossible. Two: what do you think will happen if the experiment is a failure? I don’t think we can assume that the subject will leave here on his own feet. If it’s impossible to get a body out of the morgue, it’s utterly beyond the realm of imagination to get one back in.
“Now this fellow Hocks is already buried. The world is finished with him. He doesn’t have to be accounted for. No one is going to come looking for him. He was from Maine or somewhere. He has no known relatives here and was buried at public expense. No one will know that he’s going to leave his resting place at Hangman’s Hill and spend some time with us. If we don’t attract the wrong sort of attention, that is.” He gave me a hard look as he said this, obviously regretting his choice of accomplice.
“It’s going to be a bit of a job, getting him out,” West continued. “The old body-snatchers, the resurrection men, didn’t bother with finesse. They just dug a narrow shaft down to the head end of the coffin, smashed a hole in it and hauled out the corpse. So what if it got a little scuffed in the process? The customer was going to cut the thing up, after all. That would be fine for us if we were certain we wouldn’t need to put him back in, but since we might, we must expose the whole thing and open the lid. And it’s best not to cause additional injuries.”
“Put him back in?” I asked, feeling slow and stupid once more. “Why would we have to do that? I thought the idea was to bring him back to life.”
West gave me another chilly look. “It is, but in an experiment one must always be prepared for results different from those one expects. He may very well remain dead. We must be ready for that. Now, if you’re clear on that part of the business, let’s set up the lab.”
The by now familiar task of assembling the equipment calmed me a little. Over the table which was to hold the body, I set up a collapsible framework . On it I mounted a reservoir for the liquid, another for the blood which would be removed from the subject, and an array of tubes, valves and pressure meters.
While I was engaged with this, West was weighing and measuring chemicals and reagents, mixing, heating, filtering and titrating. I watched the conclusion of the process with fascination.
Into a flask containing a clear fluid, he added, drop by drop, another clear fluid from the glass cylinder he had called a burette. He was absolutely concentrated on what he was doing. I suspected that I could have left the room, danced a jig, or done anything but interfere with him, and he would not have noticed.
Suddenly, a transformation occurred. The liquid in the flask appeared to ripple and became a violet colour. There was no gradual transition; the change was instantaneous and complete. Looking more closely, I could see a strange iridescence within the fluid. West stoppered the flask and sighed with relief.
“That’s done, then,” he said. “Sometimes it fails to react if the proportions aren’t exactly right.”
Our preparations were complete by early evening. West showed me to a sofa in the parlour, saying that I should get some rest. We would prepare to leave the house after ten o’clock.
I found it impossible to sleep, or even to relax. As soon as I closed my eyes a welter of images, real and imagined, churned through my brain. What if we were seen digging up the grave? How could we possibly carry the body to the house as West had proposed? How far was it to the graveyard, anyway? I wondered if I was physically equal to the task before me. And what would the outcome of the experiment be?
Lying on the sofa in the unfamiliar room, I felt suddenly lonely for my own ordinary life. What was I doing here, preparing to help this peculiar stranger perform an act which was both illegal and repugnant? Just about this time, I thought, I would normally be reading a little before going to bed, or perhaps enjoying a pleasant stroll, possibly with Alma. What she would think of this stunt – for so it seemed to me now – I could only imagine. Emancipated she might be, but I was certain that her world-view did not include nice young men who engaged in a little body snatching on the side.
Eventually I fell into an uneasy doze which must have become a sound sleep from which West had to shake me. “How are you feeling, Charles? Do you think you can do this?”
“I hope so,” I replied, thinking immediately that I was too hesitant. “Yes, I can do it.”
By ten-thirty we were ready to go. We had changed into some dark shabby clothes West had produced, and carried our spades and other implements muffled in a couple of sacks.
“Don’t hurry,” West admonished me as we left his rooms by way of the back door. “We’re just a couple of tired fellows making our way home, not a pair of resurrection men.” And indeed, his whole aspect had changed. The battered hat he wore concealed his bright hair, and the slouching walk he had assumed made him look the very picture of a workman going homeward after a hard day.
Despite my anxiety, I emitted a muffled laugh at the double entendre. It wasn’t only resurrection men I thought of, but ghouls.
It certainly was a perfect night for ghoulish doings. The moon was waning and cast little light. The stars were bright in the gaps between occasional clouds. I remembered my vision of the sunlit meadow and the black starlit sky. I guess I’m flying now, I thought absurdly.
Twenty minutes of steady walking brought us to a belt of trees between the graveyard and the fields beyond the town. It was dense enough to conceal our presence from passers-by until we could be about our real business.
We made ourselves comfortable in a little hollow, laying our burdens down carefully and propping our backs against the trunk of a large maple. Now that the adventure was really under way I felt almost calm and began to get sleepy.
Suddenly, West grasped my arm. I looked in the direction he was pointing
. Some way to the north was Aylesbury Street, which a little further west became the Aylesbury Pike. Shadowy figures were moving along it, in the direction of Arkham. I heard the tramp of feet and some muffled conversation. Eventually these wayfarers passed out of sight, going toward River Street and the town.
“We’d better give it another hour,” West whispered. “I didn’t think there would be so many people about.”
Conversation was obviously out of the question. I leaned back against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. I could hear the small sounds of night creatures going about their business, and a faint rustle of wind in the leaves. I could smell the freshness of growing plants and the musky earthiness of dead ones. Beside me, West was still as a stone.
I must have nodded off, because suddenly I was awake, aware of a new sound. A stealthy sound, yet distinct. I listened, trying not to breathe. There it was – a faint, irregular crackling or scraping that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
I remembered where I was. Beneath me lay the dead, dozens of corpses in varying states of decay, their skulls grinning mirthless grins. The roots of the tree I was leaning against were entwined among bones, drawing nourishment from them. Worms and insects burrowed through the mould, reveling in unspeakable feasts.
Straining my ears, I detected yet another layer of sound. Not the rustling of vermin, nor the slow disintegration of matter, but a toneless hum that registered on some sense beyond the aural, vibrating the filaments of my nerves and making me at once hyper-alert and paralyzed. It was as though I had become a receiver for an incomprehensible telegraph message from some inconceivably distant place.
I began to think I could discern individual voices. If I listened long enough I would understand what they said, except I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Then West nudged me and I nearly screamed. “Come on, Charles, wake up,” he whispered. “Time to get on with it.”
“Wait, Herbert,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? Listen.”
“Hear what?” He paused for less than a second and stood up, reaching out a hand to help me up. “There’s nothing to hear, now that you’ve stopped snoring. I nearly woke you up a few times, it was so loud.”
I decided not to argue and got to my feet, cautiously stretching out the stiffness in my limbs. I could no longer hear the sound, much to my relief. West picked up our tools and led the way into the burying ground.
A mist lay over Hangman’s Brook and the distant Miskatonic. It must have been close to midnight.
Unlike the orderly plots of Christ Church Cemetery, with their marble and granite monuments and wrought iron fences, the graveyard at Hangman’s Hill was informal and unkempt. Once or twice a year the grass was scythed and underbrush cut back, but most of the time the place was left to itself, except when a new grave had to be made.
It was not difficult to find the newest grave. A mound of fresh soil and trampled grass made it clear that this was our goal.
“We’ll pile all the earth here,” West said, indicating one side of the grave. “That will leave the other side clear for lifting him out, and it’ll be easier to shovel the dirt back in. Yes, we must fill it up again, over the empty coffin. We may not be in a position to return him tonight, and we don’t want to leave an open hole.”
I was annoyed at West’s insistence on assuming that the experiment would be a failure, leaving us with a corpse on our hands again in the end. If success was so unlikely, I thought mutinously, why were we even bothering? But I knew better than to voice these thoughts.
The digging was a tiresome business, especially for me, unused as I was to physical labour, and lacking West’s stamina and sense of purpose. It occurred to me as I toiled that this aspect of grave-robbing would be a sufficient deterrent for most would-be ghouls. It was neither thrilling nor aesthetic.
After nearly an hour of steady labour, West struck the coffin lid with his spade. “We’re nearly in business now, Charles!” he said, as we scraped away the remaining soil and exposed the wooden box. I felt relief mingled with apprehension as I straightened my tired back and leaned on my spade to rest. I was bathed in unaccustomed perspiration. The air in the grave seemed suddenly thick and fetid, and I longed to be somewhere else.
“Where did you put the pry-bar?” West asked, impatiently.
“It’s here somewhere,” I muttered, feeling around behind me. I had stuck the tool into the side of the pit, for fear of losing it.
“Well, find it, will you! We have to get on with this.”
Just then, my hand struck the bar, which fell onto the coffin lid with a thud.
“Give it here!” West snatched it from me and began to pry up the lid. When he had loosened all the nails, I helped him lift it off and cautiously shone a light within. The dead man lay on his back in a most unremarkable way. I felt inclined to stare, but West did not let me.
“Here, let’s get the rope around him,” he said. I passed it to him, keeping hold of one end while he tied the other around the body, under the armpits. We climbed out of the grave and hauled the corpse to the surface. I felt a distinct reluctance to touch it, but West showed no such squeamishness.
“I want to see if there’s water in the lungs,” he said. “We must drain out as much as possible if there’s to be any hope of success.”
We hoisted the unfortunate fellow up by his legs, then lay him face down on the ground. West manipulated his arms for a while, then got up.
“They probably got most of it out trying to resuscitate him” he said. “I think it’s all right. Now we just have to fill in the grave.” He jumped back into the hole and replaced the lid of the coffin. Hurriedly, we shoveled the excavated soil back into the opening and mounded it up as it had been previously. At West’s suggestion I concealed our spades and other tools in the woods. A feeling of utter unreality possessed me, born of weariness and my sudden recognition of the outsideness of our doings. I found the thought of re-excavating the grave almost insupportable. For this reason alone I hoped West’s revivifying fluid would be a roaring success.
With the grave restored to something resembling its former state, we turned our attention to its recent occupant. We put the body into a large sack we had brought with us. This mode of transportation would suffice until we reached the first houses on College Street.
Our homeward progress was slow. The body in its sack was heavy and awkward. I found it difficult to maintain a good grip on the thing while I traversed the narrow path along Hangman’s Brook. Several times I nearly fell, and soon felt a childish resentment toward West for selecting as unfit a creature as myself to be his assistant. But he said nothing beyond the minimal instructions needed to direct my steps. His apparent patience only made me feel more wretched.
At a vacant lot at the corner of Hill Street and College, we changed our mode of transport. I was glad to lay down the burden, if only for a few minutes. We divested the corpse of its sack and stood up with it slumped between us. Clumsily, I slung the dead left arm over my shoulders and reached around its back. This put most of its weight on the side away from my bad leg, which was starting to throb. I could feel the coldness of the dead flesh through the layers of clothing between it and myself. Only the living warmth of West’s arm where it touched mine behind the corpse’s back kept me from giving in to my revulsion, dropping the thing and running away.
Our unwieldy six-legged ménage lurched slowly along College Street. No acting was necessary on my part to simulate the unsteady gait of the inebriated. As I grew accustomed to the weight, something caused me to visualize our passage as an observer might have seen it. And with this occurred one of those odd doublings of consciousness – at one and the same time I was carrying a dead man and watching one being carried, disguised as a drunkard. I seemed to discover within myself a kinship with men of darkness, body snatchers, ghouls, resurrection men, an unholy lineage harking back to the despoilers of the royal tombs of Egypt.
Since the distance to West’s lodgings was now a mere three blocks, I hoped we co
uld reach our goal without encountering anyone, but our luck failed as we were passing St. Mary’s Hospital. A lone man, who from his gait appeared to be in the state we were hoping to imitate, came toward us.
“Sing!” West commanded, and broke into a rather good rendition of To Anacreon in Heaven, an odd choice, and an unfortunate one for me, who did not know the words. But the tune, of course, is that of our National Anthem, so I sang that instead. Together we created a fine cacophony as we lurched the last hundred yards.
As West fumbled with the key to the back door, a window in the next house flew open and a sleepy voice growled imprecations at us, ending with, “What do you fools think you’re doing, trying to wake the dead?” Fortunately, the door opened then and we fell through it, laughing like loons.
Our laughter was short lived, but at least it made me forget for a moment that the night’s real business had yet to be done. And at least we were no longer on the streets with our illicit burden.
“Why on earth did you sing?” I asked. “That guy across the street wasn’t going to bother us. And now whoever that was yelling through the window will remember us too.”
“They’ll both remember a couple of drunks singing, and another who was too soused to stand. Not two men carrying a third one, who could have been sick, or dead. Window-dressing, Charles. A diversion. At least I hope so. Now let’s get on with it, for God’s sake.”
We lugged the body into our improvised laboratory and hoisted it onto the table. “I’m going to wash up and change my clothes,” said West. “I suggest you do the same. We’re in no state to conduct an experiment.” I was surprised at this seeming frivolity in one who was so keen to ‘get on with it,’ but did as I was told. Ten minutes later, we returned to the laboratory, West in a completely fresh set of clothes, I in the sweaty items I had been wearing when I left the Cataloguing Department an eternity ago.
West put on a white lab coat and tossed me another one. “Put that on,” he said. “That’s better. Now, let’s get him undressed.”
I looked unhappily at our guest. Now that we were in a well-lit place I could not ignore the still, waxy face, its eyes slightly open, giving it a suspicious, moronic look. The fellow was wearing a dirty checked shirt and a pair of overalls.
“Must we? Can’t you inject the stuff into him with his clothes on? After all, if he gets up and goes out we don’t want him to be indecent.”
West ignored this attempt at humour. “We have to take his clothes off, Charles. No arguments. What’s the problem, anyway – haven’t you ever seen a naked man?”
“Not often,” I replied, trying to be truthful without admitting the extent of my naïveté. “And never a dead one.”
West laughed. “I’ve seen many dead ones. And believe me,” he said, taking a scalpel and slitting the overalls down the front, “nothing we do to a corpse troubles it in the least. Corpses simply don’t care.”
I did not bother to point out that if all went as he wished, this one would no longer be a corpse in an hour or two, and might very well object to how we treated it. Instead, I removed the fellow’s shoes. They were old and broken, obviously the ones he had been wearing when he drowned, because they were still damp. I wondered that they had not slipped off. He had no socks. West lifted the corpse’s shoulders and asked me to remove the shirt. Then he lifted the body at the waist while I pulled off the legs of the overalls.
The corpse lay naked on the table. In life it had been an ordinary-looking young man of perhaps twenty years, brown-haired, thin but not scrawny, the muscles of the chest and arms developed from physical labour. There was a partly healed cut on his right arm. The skin was a strange yellowish colour, suggesting wax rather than flesh, with purple patches here and there. I was reminded obscenely of something on display in a butcher shop. Despite West’s casual attitude, I studiously avoided looking at what one commonly called the private parts. Although death had stolen this man’s right to privacy, I did not have to comply. I thought I could smell the beginnings of corruption, and a cold smell of earth.
West was moving about rapidly, collecting equipment from the crate which had been converted into a kind of laboratory bench. He was completely absorbed, and appeared utterly comfortable with the situation, in contrast to myself, who wanted nothing so much as an excuse to leave the room.
He stood for what seemed like a long time with a stethoscope pressed to the corpse’s chest. “Purely for the record,” he said, making some notes. “I have to certify beyond a doubt that he’s dead before we begin. And he is.
“At this point,” West continued, in what I was coming to think of as his lecturing mode, “the problem is to introduce fluid into a body without a pulse, in sufficient quantity to be effective. In theory it should be possible to inject it directly into the heart, but in practice this has too much potential to cause damage to that organ and negate the revivifying effect. So it’s necessary to use a mechanical pump to substitute for the action of the heart, introducing the fluid into a major vein and withdrawing excess blood through a major artery. This is the reverse of what is done in embalming. The revivifying fluid must enter the heart in order to cause it to contract, which is why I shall introduce it through the jugular vein. And the excess blood will be drawn out through the femoral artery, which is sufficiently distant from both the heart and the brain not to interfere with the balance of things. The apparatus becomes, in effect, a temporary extension of the body’s circulatory system.”
He picked up another scalpel. “As an embalmer I would just slit open a number of blood vessels to ensure maximum blood flow. But there, of course, the objective is to drain out all the blood and replace it with embalming fluid. Here we want to remove only a portion of the blood, and add the new fluid. So we must follow this more exact process, because we don’t want to do any further damage.”
He made a careful cut into the flesh of the neck, exposing a blood vessel. Then he picked up a long hollow needle, which he called a cannula, and carefully inserted it into the vein, then repeated the process on the upper part of the corpse’s left leg. He attached to each needle a length of rubber tubing which dangled from the apparatus.
I watched, fascinated yet horrified, imagining the needles, which suddenly seemed very large, piercing the walls of the blood vessels and sliding inside. I wondered how that would feel, and thought I was going to be sick. That wouldn’t do. I became aware that West was speaking once more.
“Now we’re ready to introduce the fluid, but it must be done carefully, making sure that the pressures are in balance and not excessive. That’s the purpose of these meters and valves. I want you to watch this constantly and let me know the instant this one reaches 200.”
I took my place by the meter he had indicated, glad to have something to divert my attention from the thought of those dreadful needles. West picked up the flask of violet coloured liquid he had prepared earlier, and poured the contents into the reservoir of the apparatus. Then he opened the main valve and the drainage valve and began to work the pump.
At first nothing happened, except that the tube leading from the reservoir swelled and grew rigid. Suddenly, I became aware that a dark fluid was dripping into the empty flask. I realized with a jolt that it was blood, the dead man’s blood, and began to feel sick again. I concentrated on the pressure meter to steady myself. Slowly, the level of the violet fluid in the reservoir declined. The indicator held at a steady 160, then began to climb: 170, 180, 185, 190. “It’s at 195, Herbert,” I said. He grasped the knob controlling the main valve. A few seconds later, I said, “Two hundred!” The reservoir was nearly empty. Turning off the flow, West sighed audibly.
“Well, that’s it. That’s as much as he can take. Now we just have to wait.”
He turned away, checking his watch, and made some more notes. I, with nothing to do, watched the corpse. It looked as dead as ever. West glanced at me sharply.
“If you want to be useful, Charles, perhaps you could take some of
the blood in that flask and put it in a couple of test tubes. No, not like that. Use this pipette. Like this. Then pour the rest down the drain.”
I did not greet this suggestion with eagerness, but did as I was told. Returning to the room with the empty flask, I found West in a more affable mood.
“I think we should see something within an hour,” he said.
It was now after three in the morning. Dawn comes early in summer, so it would be impossible to return the corpse to its grave under cover of darkness. My heart sank at the prospect of repeating our macabre adventure in reverse order the following night.
West, on the other hand, did not show the least anxiety. “People think of undertakers as only one remove from ghouls,” he said, “but in my experience most of them are artisans of a sort, and try sincerely to deal with their clients in a respectful way. Except that with all the new tools and techniques, it’s easy to get carried away. My great-uncle Henry had a tendency to do that. He would order all the latest preservative fluids, pumps, injectors, tilting tables and other innovations advertised in the trade magazines. Not to mention things like makeup, cheek-stuffers, eyelid forms, and wigs.” He laughed. “I think Henry’s aim was to send the corpses on their way looking better than they ever had in life. But it drove his brother – my grandfather, you know – wild. ‘We’re undertakers, damn it, not taxidermists!’ he’d roar. ‘And what’s more, we have enough junked equipment to fill a warehouse, so don’t even think of buying any more!’ They were a pair, those two.”
I listened to him, but could not ignore the body on the table. It looked as dead as ever, and I wondered how long we would have to wait before we gave up.
“Do people often get buried alive?” I asked.
“Charles, you ghoul! No. Not any more. Not since we’ve had decent stethoscopes. But at one time it was quite possible for someone who showed no obvious signs of life to be buried. I suppose that’s why some customs specified so many days between death and burial. If he’s beginning to rot, the reasoning went, he must be dead. And it’s normally true.”
He was amused at the revulsion that I must have shown on my face. “And of course, there were all sorts of inventions in the last century to forestall the consequences of premature burial – bells or other alarms that could be activated from within a coffin, and devices that would assure a supply of air to the occupant. A fellow called Fearnought – yes, that really was his name, Albert Fearnought, of Indianapolis – patented something especially elaborate. A flag would pop up at the foot of a grave, should its occupant make the slightest movement. I suppose it would be incumbent on passers-by who saw it to salute and run for a spade.”
“I wonder if that would happen very often,” I said. “That someone would actually wake up in their coffin. What a horrible thought!”
“It happened all the time, if you believe some of the stories I’ve heard the older fellows tell,” said West. “You can imagine – a grave exhumed for some reason years later, and the body inside it with hands worn to tatters, and bloodstains on the inside of the coffin lid. Of course, a lot of those stories are mere legends of the trade, a kind of currency passed around as fellows try to do each other one better. But I was present at one case in which a corpse actually came back to life.
“It happened during that plague I told you about before. Everyone, doctors, embalmers, clergymen and funeral directors, had been run off their feet for weeks, as people became sick, died and became corpses needing burial. It’s very likely that proper attention wasn’t given in all cases, if you know what I mean. A woman was brought in, a lady from the High and Walnut Street district – where the best of Arkham society lives, of course. The family wanted the body embalmed, and were willing to pay twice the going rate for fast service, so a couple of us were diverted from dealing with the plebian corpses to handle that one.
“I was assisting Harry Logan, our senior embalmer. We had the body on the table and Harry was getting ready to cut the arteries, in order to drain the blood. There he was, scalpel in hand, ready to cut, when I decided to say something that had been bothering me for a while.
“‘Isn’t she a little too pink, Mr. Logan?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, pink?’ said he. You see, Harry and the others weren’t all that happy to have the big boss’s son working with them. Oh, by the time the epidemic was over they knew me to be a reliable worker, a good pair of hands, but they weren’t really welcoming, all the same. Embalmers are one of the most secretive occupational groups of all, as you may imagine. A real secret brotherhood.” He smiled strangely. “I could tell you things… But I won’t.
“Anyway, to get back to the lady on the table. ‘I think she looks too pink to be dead,’ I said, deciding to get right to the point. ‘Perhaps we should check her over.’ Normally in such a case a doctor would be summoned, but we knew they were all busy with people who were sick but still unquestionably alive. As a would-be doctor, I offered my services.
“Harry wasn’t interested. ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary, Mr. West,’ he said. ‘She was brought in yesterday, after all.’ He accused me of impure motives. ‘You just want to get a feel of her,’ was how he put it. ‘I know you young fellows.’ Then he proceeded to cut. Fortunately, he was a little more hesitant than usual, and at the first prick of the blade the woman shot up and shrieked. It was quite amazing – from a lifeless (though pink) corpse to a hysterical female in less than a second. Harry jerked so violently that his scalpel went flying. I found it stuck in the ceiling the next day.”
“So what happened then?” I asked, fascinated.
“What do you think? A happy reunion, rather than a funeral. As far as I know, she’s still alive today. Fortunately they didn’t sue.”
As he talked, West had been checking the dead man periodically. Now he bent over the body once more. Suddenly he grew tense and listened intently for a long time. Then he slowly straightened up. His eyes were shining, his face full of exaltation.
“He is not dead, but only sleeps,” quoted Herbert West.
For a moment I could only gape. Then I hurried over to West’s side. He clamped the earpieces of the stethoscope into my ears. It took me a moment to adjust, then I listened hard. I heard a faint pulsing. It’s only my own blood throbbing in my head, I thought, but as I continued to listen I found that the sound was distinctive and outside myself. The dead man was dead no longer.
A few minutes after West had detected a pulse, the man began to gasp and cough. West asked me to help support the patient (for that was what he had become) and prepared some sort of injection. “This should help him snap out of it,” he said, as he shot the stuff into the fellow’s arm.
The coughing lessened, then stopped. With a groan, the man lay down once more on the table. I could see that a faint trace of colour had returned to his skin, but he still appeared to be not far from death. Discreetly, I tried to peer into his eyes, to see if some spark of intelligence remained, but he had closed them.
West hovered over his patient for the next hour. He spoke little, only to ask me to hand him things or hold things. I noticed that he drew blood from the man’s arm and put it carefully into some labelled test tubes. During this time the condition of the revivified man did not change much, to my ignorant eye, except that his colour may have improved a little. He coughed at intervals, but did not speak.
Early light was now visible around the edges of the heavy curtains that covered the room’s single window. It reminded me that there was a world outside this room in which I felt I had passed the greater part of my life.
Suddenly, the man on the table let out a shriek. His eyes rolled in their sockets and fixed on West. Before either of us could move, he leaped to his feet and let out a string of incomprehensible words, although West declared later that they sounded to him like, “Jesus, Mary! Help me!” Pushing me aside, he dashed toward the curtained window, smashed the glass, bringing down the curtain in the process, and escaped.
It took us a few moments to
get through the back door, which was locked. By the time we were outside we could see nothing of the fleeing figure. College Street was deserted. We split up and searched the area, looking behind fences and hedges, peering down side yards and into porches. Then we circled around both alleys which paralleled College Street and repeated the process with back yards. We searched an ever-widening area, until we had covered several blocks each way, before we gave up. By this time daylight had come and people were beginning to move about.
We walked back to West’s rooms, our inappropriate laboratory garments rolled up under our arms, still looking for our escaped patient.
“He must have blundered in among the hospital buildings,” West said suddenly. “Or maybe even onto the campus. You may see him in the Library later today.”
Back at West’s lodgings, we dismantled the laboratory and returned it as far as possible to its appearance of a storage room. West declared that we should resume our normal activities, keeping our eyes open for any sign of the escapee.
“He’s bound to be noticed in short order,” said West. “Naked men do not abound on the streets of Arkham, even in hot weather such as this.”
“But what if he comes back here?” I asked. Now that we had begun to deal with practicalities, my anxiety had returned. “He could bring the police right to your door.”
“Yes, in theory,” West replied. “But somehow I don’t think that will happen. The prognosis for that fellow isn’t good.” He seemed about to say something more, but thought better of it.
I went home to wash and change my clothes before going to work. I managed to function that day, despite my exhaustion, but avoided protracted conversations with my colleagues, including Alma and Peter Runcible. The latter went out of his way to make sure that I was at my desk. Alma said only, “You look exhausted, Charles! What have you been doing?”
I nearly started to laugh, but stopped myself. “I felt ill yesterday. It was the heat, perhaps. I… didn’t sleep very well, but I think I’m feeling better.”
She looked skeptical, but did not persist in questioning me.
The previous night’s adventure seemed incredible now, especially the resurrection and disappearance of the dead man. Had he been patient, victim or experimental subject? My inability to settle on a suitable epithet was indicative of my ambivalent feelings about the whole episode. “The corpse doesn’t care,” West had said. But our man had not been squarely in the corpse category, had he? When he began to breathe and cough, when he had broken the window and run out into the street, he had been a corpse no longer, but West’s patient. Or had he? My tired mind went around and around these questions, without finding any satisfactory answers.
I did not get much work done that day. As soon as I arrived home I fell into bed and slept, if I can be permitted the simile, like the dead.
I was awakened by a steady knocking on my door. Startled and disoriented, I struggled out of bed and into a bathrobe. I opened the door to find West there, beautifully dressed and cool as the proverbial cucumber. He came in, waving a newspaper.
“Have you seen this, Charles? No, I don’t suppose you have,” he said, looking me over. “Well, read it now, while I make some coffee. I trust you have some in this bachelor establishment.” He was already rummaging in my minimally equipped kitchen, finding the coffee pot, beans and grinder and firing up the gas ring.
I turned my attention to the newspaper, folded open to a page near the front.
Curious Incident Near Hospital
A peculiar event occurred at about seven o’clock this morning near St. Mary’s Hospital. Two orderlies reporting for work were attacked by a man who had been lurking in the shrubbery near the service entrance to the main building. Both were beaten about the head and one man was stripped of his outer clothing and shoes while unconscious.
Police were summoned to the scene but no trace of the assailant was found. The weapon was thought to have been a piece of lumber picked up from a nearby building site.
One of the victims stated that the attacker was a medium-sized individual who appeared to be naked except for a burlap sack tied around his waist. He was barefoot, but no trace of footprints was found because the attack occurred in a paved area bordered by lawns.
Both orderlies are expected to recover from their injuries. Investigations continue.
By the time I had read and absorbed this, West was pacing around impatiently in my sitting-room.
“You see?” he said triumphantly. “I told you it would be all right. No connection to us, but I have the experiment fully documented, including tests on those blood samples. There were differences between them indicating that vital processes had definitely begun. But I need more results before I can publish.”
“Wait, Herbert,” I said. “What do you mean, no connection to us? Hocks is at large, running around loose. He knows what we look like and where you live, or at least where he was when he came back to life. They’re still investigating, it says here. You may get a visit from the police. At least two people saw us going into your place with the fellow the other night. And we don’t know who might have seen him this morning, or us, for that matter, running around the streets like idiots. And what about his clothes? What did we do with them? Wouldn’t whoever put Hocks in his coffin remember what he was wearing at the time?” My mind raced. There seemed to be so many details to this business.
“His clothes are dust and ashes, so you need not worry yourself on that point. And I’ve had the window repaired. I’ve been busy today, unlike some people I could mention. But never mind that,” he continued, handing me a cup of coffee. “Drink this up and listen. I’m certain that Hocks wants to avoid the police as strenuously as you and I. In fact, I suspect he wants to avoid anyone and everyone. The only reason he attacked those fellows was to get some clothes. He’s left the scene, you can be sure of that. I don’t think this case will go much further. Now, I propose we make some plans for our next experiment while this one is still fresh in our minds.”
“But Herbert,” I interjected, “surely we can’t just… forget about him? He’s our responsibility, isn’t he?”
West looked at me coldly. “Why? He chose to run away. I certainly don’t feel obligated to run after him. Now, next time – ”
“Next time?” I said, aghast. “We’re not finished with this time, if you ask me. Aside from the moral aspects of the thing, aren’t you interested in Hocks as a… a subject? Don’t you want to study him? I thought that was the point of all this.”
West stopped his pacing and stood with his back to me. “Charles,” he said, and his voice had an edge to it I had not heard before, “this is my experiment. I thought you understood that. I’m finished with Hocks. Is that clear?”
He turned around and looked at me. I made myself meet his eyes, startled for an instant to see in them a flicker of uncertainty, quickly suppressed. Then he went on, as though the interruption had not occurred.
“For one thing, I think I had better rig up some sort of restraints on the table. We can’t have subjects running amuck. I should have done it before, considering the violence I saw in some of the animals. We’re lucky he just ran away and didn’t attack one of us. I’m sure if we could just get a fresher corpse we’d have even better results…”
He went on and on, speaking ostensibly to me, but in reality using me as an object toward which to direct his thoughts, which at times ran too quickly for me to follow. I watched him and listened with an odd mixture of dismay, irritation and fascination. He was in full flight, and had been all day, that was obvious. I wondered whether he had slept at all.
“..so I think we must try it again as soon as a suitable subject becomes available. Are you game, Charles?”
He spun around and faced me, smiling, those remarkable eyes full of certainty that my answer would be yes.
“Yes,” I said, despite my misgivings. “But I have to admit, Herbert, I hope it won’t be for at least a week. I don’t have as much stamina for these goi
ngs-on as you. And I still think we should try to find Hocks.”
“Nonsense,” he said, laying a hand briefly on my shoulder. “You did well. I couldn’t have managed without your help. As for Hocks, I won’t bore you with technicalities, but I’m certain we’ve seen the last of him. And now, what do you say to some dinner? My treat, but it will have to be Da Vinci’s again, since it’s so late.”
In Da Vinci’s Grill, we were shown to the same private corner table as before.
Our conversation during the meal was general, as though West had put the topic of his research into a box. Every now and then I caught myself wondering where John Hocks was, and what he might be doing, but I said nothing.
As we walked homeward through the deserted streets, I noticed that West looked behind him several times. I nearly asked him why, but doubted that he would admit that he was still nervous about Hocks.
Before we parted, I surprised myself by asking, “Why do you want to revivify dead bodies, Herbert? I know you’ve explained it before, but what’s your real reason? Is it immortality you’re looking for?”
“Yes, ultimately. But if it is ever to become possible, it will be only because someone dared to learn more about death – what it really is. That’s the ultimate secret, isn’t it? But I think it will take me the rest of my life to fathom it.”
It had become my custom, two or three days a week, to accompany Alma to French Hill Street after work before making my way back to my own lodgings on Peabody Avenue.
The day after Hocks’s disappearance, she seemed somewhat preoccupied. As we went down the granite steps of the Library and across the main campus quadrangle she said,
“I couldn’t help overhearing what Runcible wanted to talk to you about – ”
“‘Couldn’t help overhearing?’” I mocked. By now I was aware of the fact that, due to some quirk of acoustics, there was a spot by a certain section of the shelflist that allowed one to hear most of what was said in the Department Head’s office, as long as the door was open. “I wondered why you had so much shelflisting to do in the history section.”
“I was diversifying my areas of expertise,” said Alma. “But seriously, I thought I heard him say he saw you roaming around the streets at dawn yesterday.”
“He did, but so what? He’s an interfering busybody.”
“I thought you looked like death warmed over yesterday. Wait a minute – it has something to do with Herbert West, doesn’t it? That grave at Hangman’s Hill – ”
“What grave?” I asked. I knew I had spoken too quickly and urgently, but I could not help myself.
Alma looked at me strangely. “Haven’t you heard? It was in this morning’s Advertiser. Someone’s been digging in a grave in the potter’s field, the one where that fellow who drowned was buried the other day.” Her eyes widened. “Oh Charles, don’t tell me you’re mixed up in some sort of insane body-snatching operation of West’s!”
I kept my voice calm. “Alma, you’re making some big assumptions here. Yes, I was out early yesterday, or late, if you prefer. Herbert and I made a night of it and I slept on his sofa for a while. I was sick earlier, but by the time he turned up that night I was feeling better, so… And yes, this time we did go to Water Street. Runcible must have seen me when I was on my way home. I don’t know anything about any grave. You seem to think that West does nothing but collect corpses. Actually, he has many interests.”
“Interests on Water Street,” Alma said. “I don’t know that I would be too proud of sharing those, if I were you. Really, Charles, I still think you should avoid him.”
I did not want to fabricate untruths in order to reassure her, and I could not tell her the truth. Instead, I took her hand and said,
“Don’t worry, Alma. When it comes to a choice between Herbert West and Water Street, or you and French Hill Street, you’re the winner.”
“Oh, you – you’re just trying to divert me with sweet talk.” But she looked pleased, and did not question me further about West. It was only later that I realized I had lied to her after all.
West was right, in a way. Our involvement with the corpse of John Hocks was never brought home to us by any of the conventional authorities, although we had (I thought) left such a trail of evidence that any competent investigator should have found it necessary to question one or both of us. Our grave-digging tools, for example, stayed in the woods near Hangman’s Brook for several days before I remembered them. West retrieved them that night, but anyone could have found them in the meantime.
Fortunately for us, the authorities did not think it necessary to exhume Hocks’s coffin to make sure he was still in it. They must have assumed that the disturbed earth on the grave was the doing of pranksters or amateur ghouls who had done no more than scuffle the surface to elicit ‘thrills.’ This was Arkham, after all. Up to a point the usual laws were enforced, but beyond it was a shadowy region in which wandering corpses, abducted infants and unorthodox ceremonies were ignored by the authorities, as though denial negated their existence. As we would eventually discover, this official blindness had its own hidden rules and boundaries.
Both West and I kept our ears and eyes open for further news of the escapee. Ten days went by and I was beginning to feel a tentative relief when stories appeared in the papers about a furtive ‘wild man’ who had been sighted around farms in the region, stealing from orchards and gardens. Over the next three months, details of increasing gruesomeness emerged, of animals taken and found to have been drained of blood. As often happens in rural areas, wild tales began to circulate of a monster that fed on blood. The Arkham Advertiser, in a typical effort at urban sophistication, treated these rumours with a levity that was nearly offensive. Wild Man Seen Again read a headline in the middle of August.
The Wild Man of Arkham has apparently struck once more, this time at Summer’s Farm. Mr. Summer said he spotted a shambling form among the farm’s outbuildings at dusk on Wednesday, but could not see it clearly enough to furnish a description. Investigations showed that some tools were missing from a shed, specifically a mattock and a spade. The spade was subsequently located at the edge of a potato field, where someone had apparently been digging potatoes. Mr. Summer has also reported apples stolen from trees at the far end of his orchard and the theft of chickens and eggs. Evidently the Wild Man is attempting to obtain a well-rounded diet. Similar thefts have been reported from other farms between Arkham and Bolton this summer. The missing mattock has not been found.
“He was at Summer’s Farm,” I said to West the next time I saw him. “Do you suppose that’s significant? The other sightings were all closer to Bolton.”
West seemed inclined to ignore my question. “Who was at Summer’s Farm?” he asked, finally. “What are you talking about?”
“John Hocks, of course,” I said. “Do you think he’s trying to… find his way back or something? Trying to find us?”
“No, I don’t,” West said, frowning. “And what’s more, I wouldn’t assume all these supposed thefts from farms were done by Hocks. If he’s trying to get back somewhere it would be to Maine, wouldn’t you think? That’s where he was from. These farmers just want to stir things up; I doubt if they count their chickens every day – in the literal sense, anyway. As for Hocks, I’m certain he’s either dead or gone. Most likely both.”
“But dead chickens were found. And lambs too. Someone had eaten parts of them. Raw.”
“No doubt something did eat them, but why should it be Hocks? Any other time dead livestock has been found, people quite reasonably assumed it was roaming dogs or other animals that were responsible. But it’s much more exciting to speculate about a fiendish Wild Man, especially when the papers cater to the notion.”
He refused to listen to any more about Hocks and grew angry any time I brought up his name.
The Friendship of Mortals Page 5